Spring Hijinks

In spite of the fact that it is rainy and cold again today, Spring seems to have finally taken hold here in Bologna. We had THREE whole days in the last week with sunshine and temperatures just inching past 70. That is a pretty significant improvement over the last, oh, five months! The trees are coming back to verdant life, flowers are in bloom, birds and bugs have returned to the air, and the females of the species are donning less and less clothing by the day. Ah, Springtime!

With both the arrival of better weather and a noticeable (but temporary) drop in school load this week, the general mood has improved and everyone seems to be taking advantage of it.  Last Friday, after our business game was finished (and in which our team placed third, thankyouverymuch), we had a big celebration in the usual  party house. We'd all been cooped up in very close proximity to each other for two whole days, so everyone was eager to unwind a bit and have some fun. It was the birthday of two of our classmates, so we decorated a bit with balloons and such, and cooked up a simple pasta dinner and snacks to go along with it. Oh, and a big ol' pot of sangria, plus all the wine, beer, and liquor that everyone else brought. I was particularly proud of this AWESOME can of beer I managed to find in the grocery store:

The picture itself doesn't do justice to conveying the sheer enormity of the can. Beyond being a whole liter of beer, further awesomeness was evident from the angry viking logo on the can. It was a little more expensive than normal beer, but c'mon - the thing is bigger than my head! It's got its own solar system! So, long story short, we had a great time at the party. Around midnight we went out to the city center to a club, but I don't think we were there too long. The best part was that on the way there we ran into some waaaaaaasted guy who was trying  apparently had fallen asleep standing up whilst trying to get into a church at 2am, and he was severely confused as to why the door would not open. Somehow one of us managed to convince him to join our trip to the club, but somewhere along the way he got lost in the shuffle and God only knows what happened to him. We ended the night with my favorite drunk food here in Bologna: a hot dog on frybread with fries, ketchup, and mayo. Mmmmmmm! 

Saturday was pretty relaxed. I slept in (obviously!) and went back to the party house to get my backpack, which was left there since we had gone straight from the business game to the house. We did some cleaning up and sat around talking for a while, but that was about it since everyone was pooped from the night before. We were to give a presentation on Tuesday for our Market Regulations class, so I spent the evening working on that. Sunday afternoon our group for that project met, and it was a pretty standard work a little, goof off a lot meeting, which is my favorite kind of meeting. We ordered some food from a Peruvian chicken place and it was pretty good. The sauce it came with was fairly spicy, which made me happy because I can't seem to find much spicy food at all here in Italy. I think it's a northern thing, as some of the spicy foods I have managed to find were of southern origin, but even those weren't particularly spicy. I would give my right arm for some nuclear buffalo wings or a burrito from Filiberto's with some spicy red salsa. Anyways, the chicken was good, but I did feel a little silly eating Peruvian food in Italy. 

Monday was our last all-day session of classes, at least for a while. 8am to 6pm is pretty harsh, but we are at least not spending the entire time in the one room with the human-rights-violating furniture. The next day was the last day we had to wake up for our 8am class, and it was also when we gave our presentation. It went really well, and we got the highest possible score, so we celebrated afterwards by going to the park to have some lunch and enjoy the sunshine. I brought a sandwich and plenty of cheap beers with me to last the afternoon, which stretched from about 11am to 4pm for around eight of us. If I tried something like that back home I'd be cooked through to the bone, but the air temperature was probably below 75 and the sunshine, though plentiful, wasn't too intense. I got a little tiny bit of burn, but it's already turned into a decent tan. Once we were finished lounging around the park, there was just enough time to run home, have a quick shower and go back out again for my favorite activity, aperitivo. A bunch of us met up in the center and we went to the default local pub for some excellent food and some beers. There was a big soccer match going on that night between Inter Milan and Barcelona, so we stayed around to watch the conclusion (with some of us not-so-fervent soccer fans making fun of it the whole time, of course).

The afternoon in the park on Tuesday was so nice we decided to do it again on Wednesday. We met at the faculty to do a little bit of work, but we were basically in hurry-up-and-get-it-done-as-fast-as-we-can-so-we-can-go-to-the-park mode. We went a bit later this time, around 3pm, and I brought along a proper picnic lunch; bottle of wine, big hunk of cheese, and a loaf of bread. Yes, it was as awesome as it sounds. Later that night some of us went out for a few drinks, but nothing too crazy. Just a continuation of the unwinding that was going on the rest of the week. However at one point we did end up going to the bar which lights its shots on fire, which is always the highlight of any evening!

Thursday night was really fun too. It was one of those nights that starts off as "Well, I don't want to do too much tonight since we went out last night". Yeah, we all know how those nights end up. The plan for the evening was for everyone to meet up at someone's house and have some drinks, then go dancing afterwards, which I was going to skip. Well the at-home portion of the evening ended up falling through, so we started off with mojitos at a little bar in the center. Someone also had a bottle of gin, which was intended for the party, but thankfully there are no open container laws here so it quickly become a game of finding cups and tonic or lemon soda to drink it with. After a short search, the items were procured thanks to the generosity of some local restaurants that were still open, and we had our little makeshift party in the street. Afterwards I ended up going with the others anyways, and we had a really good time. The music at the club was thankfully NOT techno, and we were doing some crazy blueberry liqueur shots because it was the cheapest thing there, which were of course being poured by an old guy that looked like a pirate. But it was all good clean fun, from what I remember anyways. Tonight I stayed in, since it's been such a crazy week. Tomorrow there there will be some more shenanigans and the possibility of trying some more authentic Bolognese cuisine, but I may be going to Torino (Turin) instead. However, the weather is supposed to be pretty crummy there, so I may just stick around and do it later on in the week now that we have some more free time away from classes. Either way there should be some more pictures next week and another travelogue! Until then, ciao!

There is such a thing as too much education

I basically spent every waking hour of every day the last week doing something for school. Ok, that may be an exaggeration, but only slightly.

Even though our accounting test was last Wednesday, we still had another group assignment to turn in on Sunday. We were obliged to download annual reports from a few companies, make an analysis and state which one we would invest in and why. Friday we met at our faculty building to work on it, and put in a couple of good hours. Then one of our groupmates said she had leave to study for a different test she was having (on a Saturday, of all days!). She wanted to go to the Giardini Margheriti and invited us to all come along if we cared to do so. Who can pass up doing a little accounting work laying in the sun at the public park on a beautiful day? Not us, that's for sure. So we stopped on the way, grabbed some sandwiches and some beer, and decided we could get in a good hour and a half more of work before the laptop batteries ran out. Well we may as well have called that plan 'Of Mice and Men', because after a sandwich and a few beers while sunning at the park, the plan to study did in fact go awry. We just ended up chitchatting, and I even managed to get in a good hour long nap in the fresh air. It was really great to get out and enjoy the weather, because after that day it turned to crap again.

Saturday was more of the same groupwork; that is, with the exception of a returned cold snap, because apparently more than a few days of spring at a time is too much to ask. We met again in the afternoon to work on our project some more (this time at a friend's house, NOT in the coma enducing sun) and got quite a bit accomplished before dinner time rolled around. Some friends in a different group had invited me over to have dinner with them and asked me a couple questions about English usage for their report (which is a pretty common request). So I had a nice quiet little dinner with their group, and that was my Saturday night. I had to meet with my group again on Sunday to finish the report before 8pm, which we just BARELY managed by the skin of our teeth. It was a pretty... interesting... day, to be sure. When I left the house that morning I was running late already, like always, but then the bus (which normally comes every seven minutes or so) didn't arrive for 20 minutes. I could have walked halfway to my friends place by that time, but oh well, whatever. So we get to the main road, hit about two stops, and then the bus driver comes over the speaker and says that we won't be making the normal route today because there is a freaking marathon going through the town. So instead, the bus detours in the opposite direction of my destination, setting me back another 10 minutes. When I finally got close to the house, there were a bunch of little stalls and kiosks set up in the street outside with various vendors and such, of a typical street fair type. It seemed cool, and we checked it out a little bit when we came down from the building to have a coffee break. There was even a guy with a whole roast pig, head and all, from which he was shaving off bits with a knife and making sandwiches. However, the coolness factor wore off as the evening dragged on, with the festivities going on outside and us holed up indoors doing our accounting assignment. There was a live band practically below our window, playing mariachi-esque latin music and Brazilian dance beats. I joked that if any Brazilian dancing girls showed up while I was stuck doing accounting, I would commit certain violent acts against our professor which decorum prevents me from listing here. Well wouldn't you know it, we looked outside about ten minutes later and sure enough, there were some Brazilian dance girls in full-on carnival outfits dancing away outside. I cannot stress enough the injustice I felt at this juxtaposition. Well, we ended up finishing our paper at 7:58pm, a scant two minutes before the deadline. However, in the ensuing scramble to have one of us actually submit the work to the instructor via email, it suddenly dawned upon us that working on three separate files on five separate computers with two different operating systems and Excel, Word, and Open Office files that all had to be converted to PDF format was *not* the most logistically sound plan we could have gone with. Expletives were flying in four different languages, flash drives swapped frantically from hand to hand, those with weak constitutions panicked and fled while old women wailed and children were crying... ok, a bit of exaggeration, but at one point I felt it necessary to add to the palpable drama of the scene by playing 'O Fortuna' on my laptop speakers. We finally got the files sent, and afterwards we were ready for a drink. A couple of us went to the local Irish pub and had some beers, but classes were starting back up at 8am the next day so we weren't out late at all.

Monday was another longgggg day of classes, and next Monday will be the same. We are finishing up the lectures for our Market Regulations course (basically legal issues with international treaties), and we also had a computer lab for our statistics class and the first class of a *new* accounting module. As much as I hate accounting, this new professor seems really cool. He's an Australian guy with a pretty impressive resume that teaches at a couple of different Universities here in Italy. He comes off as a pretty laidback kind of guy, and his teaching style is a LOT more similar to the American style I'm used to than the Italian style. After classes were finished at 6pm, I tried finding a place to get my hair cut. A few times before I'd passed a little place near where I live with a sign in the window that said "Asian Haircutters - 6 euro". It sounded delightfully shady enough to try, and the price was right, so I wanted to give it a shot. My haircuts are so simple anyone could do it, so I figured I could at least explain a basic buzzcut in my bad Italian to a Chinese person who also speaks bad Italian. Unfortunately it was already closed by the time I got there, so I had to try the next day.

Tuesday we just had our 8am regulations class again, then met for a bit to discuss the group project we must complete this week for that same class. We finished early enough that I could reattempt getting my dangerously-close-to-hippy locks taken care of (this is my first haircut since arriving six months ago, by the way). I went back to the same place, which was open this time. But when I walked in, I realized 'Asian' doesn't necessarily mean Chinese/Japanese in the rest of the world. It was, in fact, run by some Indian or Pakistani guys, and I was definitely the only non-'Asian' guy in there. But, six euros is six euros, so I decided to stick it out in the hopes that a) they were not terrorists intent on using sharp barbering instruments against infidels (less than friendly areas of the world are a lot closer here, mind you) and b) my short stature, brown hair and eyes, and backpack would sufficiently portray me as an Italian student and not an American infidel. Well they were perfectly nice, and did a fine job cutting my hair, so I was quite happy. I spent the rest of the night researching stuff for our market regulations paper, then it was up again at 8am on Wednesday for class and group meetings again until 6pm.

Nothing is uneventful here in Italy, even a simple group study session. We met in a room at a library which was not the usual one we would go to for studying, however, it is attached to our building, the Faculty of Economics. I had sent a text message to one of my friends in the group saying we were in the economics library, expecting him to show up pretty soon. Well after a short delay, he finally arrived, and promptly informed me that he thought we'd gotten lost because, in fact, we were in the Business Sciences library. Confused, I asked which was the Economics library - well, it's the one we normally go to, except we always just call it 'Bigiavi', for the person it's named after. My next question was, obviously. why the hell is THIS the Business Sciences library, attached/inside of the Faculty of Economics building, while the Economics library is across the street and the Business Sciences building is halfway across the city? The response, of course, was: well, because this is Italy. I should have known. And the ridiculousness only grew as the day passed: as the afternoon rolled by, we could hear a voice coming over a speaker outside. I figured it was some kind of demonstration, as is fairly common here. But after it continued for a good 30 minutes, I decided to get up and see what the hell kind of demonstration would be going on in the late afternoon outside of a library, of all places. Well, turns out, it was just some lone lunatic, on a bicycle, with a loudspeaker, yelling about electroshock therapy and conspiracies or some such nonsense. At first I wondered why no one at the school bothered to go tell him to shut the hell up, but then I realized it was after 3pm and there probably weren't any administrators left working in the building.

Today was pretty cool. The school set up a business game for the students through an outside company which goes around the world hosting these kinds of competitions. We were divided into teams and are pitted against each other via a computer program that simulates the effects of choices in several dozen variables for all different aspects of a finished-goods production company. It's actually pretty fun! We choose stuff like how many units to produce, which materials to buy, money to spend on promotions, opening new stores, hiring staff, training, etc etc etc. We get to see the effects quarter by quarter and adjust accordingly as market shares change dynamically, consumer trends vary, and our stock prices change. Today we just did a practice run and then two quarters of the first round game. Our team actually did the best in the practice round out of both the first year and second year students in our program, but so far we're in second place for the first year students in the actual game. Whoever wins after two more quarters in the first year students will face off against the winners in the second year class. It sounds pretty boring, but it's actually really cool to be able to apply a lot of the concepts we have been learning about. The only thing that kind of sucks is we only have about two hours to make decisions for each quarter that passes, and it isn't nearly enough time to accurately analyze all the vast amount of information the game simulates. Well we played from 9am to 6pm today, and tomorrow the same schedule is planned, after which we are having a little party and going out to celebrate some birthdays for a few classmates, so if all goes well tomorrow should be a pretty awesome day! Ciao for now.

Easter: Week of Miracles

Not the least of which was the fact that I don't think I failed my accounting test. But I'll get to that part.

I left off last week's update in great anticipation of our little group dinner that was happening the next night, and I was not disappointed. We ended up being in a group of nine, basically all the students from our course that were left in town before Easter when everyone would be at home. Bologna is infamous for being a ghost town around holidays and during the summer, when the population drops by about 90,000 as all the students go back to their hometowns. So, the nine of us met up in Piazza Santo Stefano, where the 'Sette Chiese' (Seven Churches) are located. It's basically a group of seven churches (fancy that) which were all built in this relatively small plot of land so that they were actually joined with passages between them, and bits of one church overlapping bits of another. The restaurant we were heading to was, appropriately enough, 'Osteria Sette Chiese'. Restaurant would probably not be the best description for what it is - osteria translates better as 'tavern' in English, and it certainly looked the part. Dark inside, a little cramped, and long wooden benches and tables set the mood. At first I was a little disappointed because they did not offer the Bolognese staples I was looking forward to trying - tortellini, lasagna, and tagliatelle al ragu, all of which were born in Bologna. But here, the tortellini is never served in red sauce or with cream - only in brodo (broth); likewise, if you've ever had 'spaghetti bolognese', or spaghetti with meat sauce, the 'bolognese' part of the name refers to the al ragu style which was invented here - but it's usually served with tagliatelle, and no self-respecting Italian would be caught eating it with spaghetti! But none of those items were on the menu; instead, all of us opted for sharing huge platters of bresaola and prosciutto (cured, sliced meats - another Italian specialty). The bresaola arrived on top of a bed of arugula, and topped with shaved parmesan cheese. The prosciutto was served along side melted scamorza cheese (kinda like mozzarella). We also had heaping baskets of piadina (flatbread) and tigelle, a regional specialty of dense bread that's risen just a little. As an appetizer, they brought out some trays of crostini (similar to bruschetta) topped with lots of different things like sausage, brie and walnuts, tomatoes and garlic, pizza-style, and even liver-pate`. We also went through about five carafes of wine during the dinner, which always helps. For dessert there were a few different options, and I went with vin santo - a type of sweet dessert wine served with sweet little biscotti-type cookies which are used to soak up the wine. It's like oreos and milk for adults! After all that, they even brought out a couple bottles of Italian liquers and just plopped them down on the table for us to enjoy, which we of course proceeded to drain empty. Overall it was a rousing success, and we all went home sufficiently stuffed and contented. Here are some photos from the osteria's website so that you can all be thoroughly jealous:

The interior of the tavern:

Big baskets of piadine and tigelle:

The platters we got were considerably bigger than this. You can see the meat covered in grated parmesan cheese, and also some varieties of the crostini:

Little did I know this would just be the beginning of my culinary adventures for the holiday weekend.

Our communal dinner was on Thursday night, and Friday and Saturday came and went without much to note; our nine-strong group dwindled even further as others went home for Easter, and everyone was stuck with their nose in a book for our big accounting exam on the coming Wednesday. I didn't have any real plans for Easter, but as luck would have it I was graciously invited over for lunch at a friend's place with his family. I was really excited for it, because a) his grandmother was doing all of the cooking and b) he's Bolognese Bolognese, aka born and raised here in Bologna, which means his grandmother would be making tortellini! 

I went over to his grandmother's place around 1pm, a nice little apartment in a quiet part of town not far from the university quarter. I was worried I'd be an imposition on their holiday, but I think his family genuinely enjoyed hosting an Americano for a traditional Easter meal. His grandmother was certainly excited to be dishing me up my first real taste of true tortellini, Bolognese style. I was nervous myself at first too, not wanting to be an imposition, but I really had fun chatting with them in Italian, and they were curious to ask about life in the States. First thing's first of course, so out came a Martini bottle for a little aperitif before the meal. We also had some homemade wine from the dad's cousin to go along with the meal. And what a meal it was! First came the tortellini in brodo. Not only did the grandma make the tortellini by hand (traditional with meat, cheese, and a little nutmeg), but also the broth was homemade too - stewed with meats and veggies for who knows how long, like only an Italian grandma can. Next came two big platters of meat: lamb, lightly breaded and fried, and stewed beef cooked to that perfect melt-in-your-mouth goodness. Some salad was there too, but that was just a minor delay on the path to desert. The traditional Easter cake is a sweet bread in the shape of a dove, called colomba, filled with candied fruit bits and lightly topped with icing and almonds. There was also a big chocolate Easter egg, which was summarily broken and devoured, and some sweet Sicilian-style marzipan cookies with various toppings - chocolate, cherries, pistachio, etc. It was all followed up by some lambrusco, a mildly-sweet and bubbly red wine, and another sweet dessert wine.  I don't think I've eaten that much food since the day I stepped off the plane here in Bologna! It was immensely enjoyable, and I'm really glad my friend extended the invite to me. After that, I felt like having a walk to center to see if there was anything going on, and of course to settle the contents my now bursting stomach. My friend came with, and we just walked around the city center area for a bit. We ended up passing the city archeological museum, which had free entrance for the day, so we decided to give it a look. There was a nice exhibit of Egyptian artifacts going on, complete with mummified cats, alligators, and people. There was a little interior courtyard of the museum that was completely empty except for some benches here and there, and a few little jars in Egyptian style, just sitting in a corner. We pondered about the curious presence of the jars, as they didn't seem to be part of any display, and certainly they couldn't be actual artifacts sitting out on the ground, unsupervised in the vacant courtyard, and exposed to the now gently raining atmosphere. We figured them to be reproductions, and joked about how easy it would be to swipe them if they were real. As we browsed the rest of the collection, we passed an attendant and my buddy asked about the jars, as we were still curious about what they were for. Well, it turns out, they were in fact actual 3000 year old Egyptian artifacts, and they  are used in the courtyard for demonstrations during visits by school groups. We were both astounded, and half-tempted to carry out a little larceny, but now the museum attendants knew that we knew their secret, so we decided to leave well-enough alone. And to think I had almost picked up one of the jars earlier because it was inconceivable someone would leave something like that out, unattended! Well, if anyone wants to come visit me soon, at least I know where we can go manhandle some artifacts that were already ancient when Caesar was still walking the planet (Al, I'm looking in your direction). After the museum, we walked around a bit more, but the rain really started coming down so we headed back to our respective homes. I spent the rest  of the night studying and watching Eurotrip, one of my favorite movies, which is all the more funny after having lived in Europe.

Monday and Tuesday where basically just a blur of current assets, bonds payable, accrued interest, and amortization schedules. I was really nervous going into the test Wednesday because even with all the hours I put into studying, I still didn't have a firm grasp of what the hell we were doing in that class. Luckily, out of all the potential questions he put on the test from the study guide, he picked the few for which I was halfway confident in my knowledge. But of course I managed to screw up the easiest part of the test. The whole thing was five pages of questions and data sheets, some of which were fill-in-the-blank places for balance sheets, income statements, etc, and we only had an hour and ten minutes to do the test. Of course the test proctor had to be a bastard and started calling out the time left every five minutes after we were down to the twenty minute mark, which had the effect of exponentially increasing my anxiety every, oh, five minutes or so. Well, up to that point I had been concentrating on the main problem, which was journalizing transactions and filling in the blanks for the financial statements. I was almost done so when he called out the twenty minute mark, I decided to focus on the other problems which would take some time, and finish off the rest of the main question after. Well it took a little more time to do the other questions than I expected, and when I finished with about 30 seconds left for the exam, I breathed a sigh of relief. So the proctor called time, and we all put our pens down and turned over the exams... only for me to realize I hadn't looked at the back of the last page of the exam, where the Cash Flow statement was hiding, forgotten about, and was now staring back at me empty and incomplete.

DOH.

It probably would have taken, oh, *30 SECONDS* to finish that last part - hopefully that factors into its weight for the test points, but I think the rest of the exam went well enough that I won't have to worry about it.  At least that is what I'm telling myself to be able to fall asleep at night. Of course after the exam we all ran outside towards the freedom of a sunny day in the park accompanied by cheap beers, discussing the test the whole way, and my answers seemed to be in line with the general consensus so I was happy. We spent the entire rest of the afternoon in the Giardini Margheriti, the big public park to the south of the city. You may remember it from a post way-back-when, after I had just barely arrived. Yeah, it's been that long since there was a decent enough day in Bologna that we could all get together and enjoy the sunshine. Sitting, talking, enjoying some beers and the spring sun - this is why I came to Italy! People were out in full force, and the place was pretty packed. We had enough room on our little grassy claim to play schiacciasette, a ball game that could be translated as "seven smash", wherein you hit a volleyball (or something similar) around a circle, trying to get six consecutive hits, and then on the seventh you try to smash the ball towards your friends and get them out. Sounds pretty simple, but add some beers and a bunch of brain-fried accounting students and you'd be surprised. Anyways, it ended up being a pretty good day and a nice way to blow off some steam after the test, but now it's back to the old grindstone already. Today we spent the afternoon working on a group project that is due for the accounting class at the end of the week, and classes will start up again on Monday. It'll probably be another studious weekend, but at least with everyone back in town there is a slightly increased chance of something crazy happening. Until then, addio!